How Raken Helps Facilitate Major Construction Projects

Raken is a service that allows construction managers to keep track of job site information. Construction photos, videos and attachments can be added to the app. And a daily report can be sent from phones and tablets. Raken is used by superintendents, project managers, subcontractors and foremen for their daily reports.

Sergey SundukovskiyRaken

Sergey Sundukovskiy, the co-founder, chief technology officer and chief product officer of Raken, told me that he and CEO Kyle Slager worked on construction projects over the summers in high school and college. They built the construction solution with a field-first and mobile-first design for everyday workflows that superintendents and foremen need to tackle, whether it is daily reports, manpower tracking, task management, photo management or safety measures. Then they started capturing data from clients and analyzed it in a way to provide actionable insights and metrics on job site performance. Slager also interviewed over a hundred construction companies during the product development process and walked on job sites with end users as they used the initial prototypes.

“The original idea was based on a vision of a more connected and effective project team working towards a common goal – completing a construction project safely, on time, and under budget. A typical construction project has hundreds of individuals from many different companies/trades, all with their own objectives, and timelines. These teams communicate both internally and with other project stakeholders on a constant basis through what the industry calls 'daily reporting,'” said Sundukovskiy in an interview. “We provide the fastest, easiest solution for daily reports and by doing so, eliminate the pain points associated with pen-and-paper daily reports for our primary end user, the field foreman or superintendent on the job site. Historically, construction software was not designed for the field. Many companies would buy an all-in-one software that was vetted by project managers and executives in the company and met their needs, but when that same software was passed down to the field, it was too complicated and not mobile friendly, leading to low adoption from field users. Superintendents and foremen continued to use pen and paper or Excel spreadsheets.”

Contractors and subcontractors use the Raken mobile and web apps on a daily basis for documenting activities at the construction site. As they take photos, videos and notes, daily reports are generated. The daily reports contain information like weather conditions, manpower hours and survey answers. And Raken aggregates information representing the entire duration of the projects. The daily reports can also protect construction companies from litigation years down the line as they can be used in reference in the case of a lawsuit.

Raken InsightsRaken

Raken started out as a simple app and over the last few years it evolved by offering hand-typed notes and pictures on a single report to a voice-enabled report software suite that covers multiple workflows on mobile devices and the web. Sundukovskiy said “we push nearly 500 bugs fixes, improvements, and features on a monthly basis. Our latest major product developments are geared towards actionable analytics and project insights.”

Peachtree Mechanical Inc. and Superior Rigging & Erecting used Raken for an 86,000-seat multi-purpose football/soccer stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, that opened in August 2017. Raken was also used for the $6 billion development of the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco, California. The new Transbay Center is the largest approved public transportation project in the U.S.

Within 18 months of launching in 2014, Raken was named the No. 1 Daily Reporting App at Associated General Contractors (AGC) National. And 1,000 active clients signed up for Raken in 2015. In late 2016, Raken received $2 million in seed funding to accelerate product development. Raken’s investors include Rincon Venture Partners, Spider Capital and Eniac Ventures. Now Raken is used in over 38 countries.

Raken app being used in a construction site in San DiegoRaken

“Our goal is simple – provide greater value to our customers than any other solution out there. To accomplish this goal, we have to have the deepest understanding of our customer – this is why we invest heavily in customer success. On the product side, we will be developing additional workflows to complement our daily reporting solution. Based on our net negative customer churn, Raken will become further entrenched with our existing customer base, while rapidly acquiring clients that are sitting on the sidelines and using pen and paper or to manage daily reports,” added Sundukovskiy. “Our existing daily reporting construction workflows will continue to be enhanced based on the feedback from our customers. We will certainly continue our international expansion. Having one of our feet planted firmly in the present, we are actively experimenting with augmented reality, machine learning, drone photography and the Internet of Things (IoT). We often get asked, who does Raken compete with? We find ourselves in the field with non-zero-sum gain. In other words, we do not need to take business from anyone to grow. We do not see a purely competitive situation with any company, in fact, the opposite is true. We feel that 'high tide lifts all the boats' and we have plenty of synergies with other technology companies in the field. As such we will continue to integrate and openly cooperate with other partners.”

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